If this makes a difference in the web panel’s performance, then all I can say is Halleluyah! But to take the panel down smack in the middle of the day? Most hosts would schedule this kind of a “take the whole thing down” maintenance at 11 pm, not noon/3pm (my time).

What happens if something goes wrong right in the middle of everyone’s workday? I’m not as concerned about the glacial web panel, but I have a lot of clients that rely on webmail and if it gets any slower than it is I’m in serious you-know-what. I’m getting a lot of complaints.

It ain’t so bad. Time-critical businesses have contigency plans for outages, and most businesses operate on schedules with more than one hour margin anyway. Besides, email is not affected. Better to get this kind of a thing out of the way ASAP.

The annoucement emails take a really really long time to go out. It’s dependent on each individual’s contect preferences whether they receive them via email, and there are many accounts with multiple contact points. The announcement I sent on Friday was sent to something like 75,000 people, which can take awhile.

That said, it can definitely be made faster than it is now!

And as often happens, we weren’t expecting to do the maintenance that took place on Friday, but the Panel and backend jobs were getting so borked up that we felt it was important to do it pretty much ASAP.